Comparison

Busabase vs Firebase for AI Agents

Firebase gives your mobile and web apps a managed backend on Google Cloud. Busabase gives your agents and your team a shared workspace — visual tables, a team knowledge base, Skills, and apps — where every change an agent makes is a Change Request you can read, review, and undo. If your question is where the work your agents do for the business should live, Busabase answers it on day one.

Firebase's agent tools are excellent at helping a coding agent build and operate a Firebase app. Busabase is built for the other half of agent work: the records, documents, and decisions agents produce every day. Many teams will want both; this page compares them job by job.

Last verified 13 November 2026 against Firebase's pricing page, its Firestore, MCP server and agent skills documentation, the Firebase blog, and Busabase's current product.

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The short verdict

Choose Busabase when

agents produce work your team has to read, check, and build on — customer records, research, content, operating docs, Skills — and you want history on every change, views for non-engineers, and apps on top, without building a backend first.

Choose Firebase when

you are shipping a mobile or web app and need its backend: user sign-in, a realtime database with offline sync, push notifications, analytics, and crash reporting, at Google Cloud scale.

Use both when

your app runs on Firebase and your agents do the work around it — sales, content, support, operations. Their output lives in Busabase; your app's user data stays in Firebase.

The core difference: every change is a Change Request

Busabase treats every edit like a pull request for your data. A new record, a rewritten Doc, an edited Skill file, a schema change — each one is a Change Request: a branch with a chain of immutable commits. Merging moves the record forward, and the earlier version is still there.

Firebase protects data at the door. Firestore Security Rules check each request from your app and either allow it or reject it; server libraries skip the rules and rely on IAM. Once a write goes through, the document holds the new value. To get an older state back, you recover a point in time from the last 7 days or restore a backup — both into a new database, not one document at a time.

Every write explains itself. Each change carries a message and a field-level before and after, so a reviewer sees exactly what moved.
Every change has a name on it. The author, and the agent key or tool it came through, stay on the commit for good.
Undo one change, not the whole database. Records, Docs, and Skills keep their full history, and any single change can be rolled back.
Review is your call. Writes with write access merge straight away. Give an agent a proposal-only key and it cannot apply anything: its changes wait in the Inbox until a person approves or sends them back.

A Busabase Change Request under review: its message, a before-and-after diff of a record's body, and Approve or Request changes controls — A Change Request in the Busabase Inbox: the message, who proposed it and through which tool, and the field's before and after, ready to approve or send back.

That is the difference between letting an agent near your data and letting it work on your data: in Busabase, every change it makes stays visible, attributable, and reversible.

What else Busabase gives your agents and your team

With a backend like Firebase, each of these is something you design, code, and host. In Busabase they are part of the workspace.

Visual data tables

Open any Base as a table, gallery, kanban board, calendar, or Gantt chart. Save views, combine AND/OR filters, and let anyone on the team check an agent's output without a console or a query.

A team knowledge base

Docs with your policies, files agents produce, and Bases with your records live in one tree. People and agents share it, under one set of permissions.

Grep across everything

A single regex search runs over files, Doc bodies, records, and agent prompts and returns each match with its line and context — the fastest way for an agent to find evidence.

Skills you upload

Your team's Skills go into the workspace once, and every connected agent follows the same version. Editing a Skill is a Change Request, so you can see who changed the rules.

Apps with four engines

Your agent can build an AirApp on top of your data and run it in the browser, on your own machine, in a cloud sandbox, or as a website that stays online.

Websites on your domain

The Website engine runs on Cloudflare Workers, supports backend endpoints, and serves your own domain. The agent that built the site can preview and publish it.

Made for a team

Invite people as readers, writers, or managers, and give each agent a key capped at the level its job needs. Permissions can be set per node and per key.

Agents connect in minutes

MCP, a CLI, an OpenAPI REST API, webhooks, and plugins for Claude Code and Codex. The bundled skill shows the agent how your workspace is laid out.

Your data, where you want it

MIT-licensed. Run it on a laptop, on your own servers — even fully offline — or on Busabase Cloud, and export a space to plain Markdown, Base definitions, and JSON records.

A Busabase Base showing agent-written blog posts as a table with title, cover image, and body columns, plus saved views for Ready to publish and Drafts — A Busabase Base holding posts an agent wrote. Anyone on the team can read and edit them, and saved views such as “Ready to publish” slice the same records.

Comparison by the job you are trying to do

Each row is a job a team brings to these products. Firebase's home ground gets its own row, and the table says plainly where Firebase is the tool to use.

What you are trying to do	Busabase	Firebase
See what changed, before and after, and who changed it	Built in — a Change Request with a field-level diff, author, agent key, full history, and undo	Not per document: a write replaces the document. Point-in-time recovery (up to 7 days) and backups restore into a new database
Let one agent propose changes without applying them	Yes — a proposal-only key; its changes wait in the Inbox for a person	Not in the data layer: Security Rules allow or reject a client request, and server libraries bypass them
Let teammates read and edit what agents wrote	Yes — table, gallery, kanban, calendar, and Gantt views, no queries	The Firestore data viewer and Query builder in the Firebase console, built for developers
Bring teammates and agents into one workspace	Yes — members with read, write, or manage roles; agents join with their own keys	Project members with IAM roles for the console and APIs
Run a team knowledge base	Yes — Docs, files, and Bases in one tree, with shared permissions	Cloud Storage for files; no documents
Find exact text across everything	Yes — one regex grep over files, Doc bodies, records, and agent prompts	Queries over your own collections; full-text search is in preview on Firestore Enterprise edition
Give every agent the same team Skills	Yes — upload once; every connected agent reads the same version	Not a product feature (Firebase agent skills teach agents how to build with Firebase)
Turn the data into an internal tool, no app project needed	Yes — your agent builds an AirApp that opens inside the workspace	Write the app yourself or with a coding agent, then deploy it
Publish a website on the same data, on your domain	Yes — Website engine on Cloudflare Workers, custom domains (Plus and above on Cloud)	Yes — Hosting and App Hosting take custom domains; the site's code is yours to write
Connect Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, and other agents	Yes — MCP, CLI, OpenAPI, webhooks, and agent plugins	Yes — a local MCP server, agent skills, and plugins, aimed at building and running your Firebase project
Know the bill before it arrives	Flat per seat — no metered overage	Pay as you go beyond free quotas; spend caps are in public preview and are not hard caps
Self-host, including offline	Yes — MIT, from a laptop to an air-gapped network	No — a managed Google Cloud service; the Emulator Suite is for local testing only
Backend for your own mobile or web app: user sign-in, realtime sync, push, analytics	Not its job — use Firebase	Yes — this is Firebase's home ground

Coming next

These three are being built now and are not available yet. They are listed so you can plan; this page will change when they ship.

App users In development

The people who use an app you publish — customers of a shop, for example — sign in with an email code and only ever see their own records. The platform enforces it; they are not workspace members and do not use a seat.

Ontology In development

Describe the business objects your team works with — Company, Contact, Deal — and how they link, on top of the Bases you already have. People and agents then speak the same language, and changes to it are Change Requests.

Fine-grained permissions In development

Access by row and by field inside a Base, agent grants limited in scope and time, and access requests a person signs off — so no agent holds more access than its job needs.

Firebase's agent tools build apps. Busabase is where agents do the work.

Firebase has gone further than most backends in welcoming agents. Its MCP server works with Antigravity, Claude Code, Cursor, VS Code Copilot, and other clients; its agent skills teach an assistant “Firebase best practices”; and plugins bundle both for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor. A coding agent can create a project, set up sign-in, write starter Security Rules, and deploy.

Those tools are about building and operating an app. The MCP server can also read and write Firestore documents, and it acts “with your approval”: the approval your coding tool asks for at the moment a call runs. After that, the document simply holds the new value: there is no message saying why it changed, no diff to review later, and no way to undo that one change.

That is fine for an app's own data. It is not enough for the work agents do for a business — updating customer records, drafting content, keeping operating docs and Skills current — where you need to know what each agent changed and why, and to reverse a single mistake. In Busabase, that record is kept for you on every write.

One more thing worth knowing if you are choosing tools today: Firebase Studio, the AI-assisted full-stack development environment it launched as a preview, is sunsetting on March 22, 2027, and Firebase points agent-driven building to Google AI Studio and Antigravity. Firestore, Authentication, and the other core services are not affected.

Using them together

A common split for a team that ships an app on Firebase and runs agents alongside it:

Your app — its users, sign-in, realtime data, and push notifications — stays on Firebase.
A support agent reads incoming feedback and files it into a Feedback Base in Busabase, where the product team triages it on a kanban board.
A content agent drafts release notes and store listings in a Content Base; an editor reviews its Change Requests before anything is published.
When something should reach the app, your code reads the finished records through the Busabase API — or the agent publishes them as an AirApp website on your domain.

Firebase keeps your app running for its users. Busabase keeps your agents' work readable, accountable, and reusable for your team.

Pricing at a glance

Busabase

Free: 1 space, 3 seats, 5,000 records, 1 GB of files, every node type including Skills, workflows, and AirApps.
Plus: from $10 per seat per month (billed yearly). Pro: from $20.
Flat per seat, no metered overage. Self-hosting is free under MIT with no seat limit.

Firebase

Spark: no cost and no payment method, within free quotas — Firestore Standard, for example, includes 1 GiB stored, 50K reads and 20K writes a day.
Blaze: pay as you go; Spark's no-cost usage is included, then most services bill at Google Cloud rates. Eligible new accounts can get $300 in credit.
Spend caps for AI Logic, Cloud Functions, and App Hosting are in public preview; Firebase notes they are not hard caps.

Prices as published on 13 November 2026. See Busabase pricing and Firebase pricing for current details.

Where Firebase is the better choice

You are building a mobile or web app. Authentication, Firestore with realtime sync and offline support, Cloud Functions, Cloud Messaging, Crashlytics, and Analytics come with SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter, Unity, and the web. Busabase is not a mobile backend.
You want Gemini inside your client app. Firebase AI Logic calls Gemini models from mobile and web apps without a server of your own, and the rest of Google Cloud is one step away.
Your writes are machine-scale. Events, telemetry, and high-frequency app updates belong in an application database.

Busabase's limits, plainly: no realtime subscriptions, no vector index, no push notifications or crash reporting, and no migration tooling for your app's schema. Sign-in for the end users of apps you publish is in development (App users) and not available today. If you need these now, keep Firebase for your app and use Busabase beside it.

Frequently asked questions

Does Busabase replace Firebase?

Not as your app's backend. It replaces what teams would otherwise bolt onto a backend to hold agent work: an internal admin screen, a shared docs folder, change tracking, and the internal tools built on top.

Firebase's MCP server can already write to Firestore. Why add Busabase?

Because writing is only half of it. Firebase's MCP tools act with your approval in the editor, then the document holds the new value. In Busabase every write is a Change Request with a message, a diff, its author, and an undo — and your teammates can read the result in a table, not a console.

How is a Change Request different from point-in-time recovery?

Point-in-time recovery takes the database back to a moment in the last 7 days, into a new database. A Change Request is a single change with its own message and diff: it can wait for review before it applies, and it can be rolled back on its own without touching anything else.

Does every agent write need a human review?

No. Writes with write access merge immediately and keep their history. Review is opt-in: give an agent a proposal-only key, or have it submit a change for review.

Can one agent write to Firebase and Busabase in the same run?

Yes, and it is a natural split: your app's operational data goes to Firebase; research, records, content, and docs go to the workspace.

Can I self-host Busabase?

Yes. It is MIT-licensed and runs on a single machine, on your own server, or in an air-gapped network. See the self-hosting guide. Firebase itself is a managed service; its Emulator Suite is meant for local testing, not production.

Next step

Connect an agent you already use and give it one real job that ends in a Base — a feedback triage list, a release-notes calendar, a customer table. Your team can open the result as a table in minutes and see every change it made.

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Sources: Firebase pricing, Firebase MCP server, Firebase agent skills, Get started with Cloud Firestore Security Rules, Firestore point-in-time recovery, Firestore scheduled backups, Introducing Firebase spend caps, Firebase Local Emulator Suite, Firebase Studio sunset and project migration, What’s new from Firebase at Cloud Next 2026, Busabase pricing